San Mateo Office Park Sells With Housing Conversion Plans

The corporate headquarters of camera company GoPro is turning into housing.

Harvest Properties and Stockbridge Capital Group acquired the Clearview Business Park in San Mateo in an off-market transaction for $102 million, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The 22-acre office campus at 3000-3155 Clearview Way spans 379,615 square feet and consists of six buildings and surface and structured parking.

Oakland-based Harvest Properties and San Francisco-based Stockbridge plan to re-entitle the Clearview Business Park as a 225-unit for-sale residential community of townhomes and single family homes. A 15 percent portion of the homes will be set aside for low-income households. In San Mateo County, low-income is defined as making a maximum of 80 percent of area median income, or $108,300 annually.

The corporate campus, built in 1973, is partially leased to GoPro. The company will occupy the space until its lease expires next year, though it’s unclear where it will relocate its operations. Prior to GoPro moving in in 2011, the campus served as the headquarters for Visa International.

As large multifamily projects across the Bay Area are paused amid rising construction costs and high interest rates, the low-density townhomes and single-family homes will help fill a gap in San Mateo housing. The effort “responds directly to two regional realities — the ongoing housing shortage and the structural challenges facing the office market,” Preston O’Connell, partner at Harvest Properties, said in a statement.

“Projects like this are rare, but they’re essential to expanding the for-sale housing supply and creating opportunities for current and future San Mateans,” Tyler Issadore, senior director at Harvest Properties, said.

The office market across the Peninsula has seen seven consecutive quarters of negative net absorption, according to Colliers data cited by the Chronicle. In San Mateo, the office vacancy rate sits at 24.1 percent, per Kidder & Matthews’ second-quarter report. That’s above the national rate of 20.8 percent, per Cushman & Wakefield, but below San Francisco’s soaring office vacancy rate of 34.8 percent.

The Clearview Business Park redevelopment plan marks the second office campus Harvest Properties is converting into housing. The company is working on the 26-acre, 290-home Peninsula Heights project in San Mateo.

The city of San Mateo is required to build 7,015 new units of housing by 2031 as part of its Housing Element.

— Chris Malone Méndez